But to resume. Yes, Harare has become a shadow of its former self. I don’t know how important this is to our leadership, who enjoyed some of its splendours in exiled times gone by, and now seem to find nothing wrong with the desolation that it has become.
But this is an election year — just as it is in the United States. Grand gestures must be made. Flesh must not just be pressed, but be seen to be pressed.
A hug and a grin for President Robert Mugabe, doves of peace and battleships in the chaos of Haiti, and a pat on the back for President Joseph Kabila, unelected leader of the vast, hungry, debatable entity called the Democratic Republic of Congo, Africa’s irregular heartbeat, the eternal question mark over the whole post-colonial agenda.
What has it all come to? Why are we not being told?
But to return to the striking, unforgettable images of Harare. So many things stand out. I am sitting with friends of old on the veranda of their picturesque house, my home-from-home, always the same, always welcoming, always perched just above the impending mudslide of the beautiful, treacherous savannah. Always there.
”Where else would we be able to have a lifestyle like this?” they say to me, as we all stare out into the beautiful gloom and listen for the sounds of an incipient revolution that will never come out of the night.
The subtext is that we are all strangers, interlopers here. What right do we have to be here? But, heck, here we are.
It is daylight now. We jump into the car, making the unnatural assumption that there is still petrol in it. The Libyans have lost patience with this revolution that never comes, and have pulled out their oil pipelines and gone on to look for greener pastures in the north. (These used to be very green pastures, by the way. But I digress.)
But amazingly, surprisingly, petrol there is, the gas tank is tanked up, and so we drive into the remnants of the town that we were not involved in building, but now have every intention of owning, possessing, inhabiting, using up in any way that we like and generally controlling at the behest of our fickle whims. We drive, in a word, into Harare.
It’s a funny feeling. Something is wrong. There is hardly any traffic on the roads. But then again, what right do we have to expect traffic: cars, buses, motorbikes, kwela-kwela wagons loaded up with all the usual suspects and trucks (apart from various prangs that one sees, including a juggernaut that had fallen over on its side while trying to negotiate a perfectly simple, right-handed corner and spilled its load of precious bags of mealie meal on to the unsuspecting sidewalk — and nobody had tried to loot it for a whole two days)?
Why shouldn’t the African bush be simply allowed to take over again, without our ludicrous expectations of righteousness, good governance, automatic wealth and empowerment? What right do we have to expect Harare to look like it did in the good old colonial days?
Why, in fact, should the grass still be green and the jacaranda trees still have dizzy, foreign, purple buds like they did before? What business is it of ours?
And so we drive on into the deserted town. We get stuck at a significant crossroads where there is, for once, some traffic blocking our progress as we try to make a right turn towards the central business district (which is where they formerly did business). We get stuck for an indefinite period of time because the robots are not working.
Actually, I exaggerate. The robots are not working because there are no robots there at all. The tall, yellow metal stalks that used to hold the robots in place are bent at a peculiar angle, and the red, amber and green lenses that used to control the intersection like cruel, silent policemen have long since disappeared. There is no longer any kind of long-distance regulation from an unseen point in the depleted city that tells drivers when to go, when to stop, or when to just get ready to do one of the above.
No more robots. I swing my head towards my friend behind the wheel with an unasked question. ”The discos,” he says, without waiting for me to articulate my unspoken thought.
”What discos?” I say.
”Managers from the discotheques come out in the middle of the night and steal the lights in the robots so that they can have coloured lights in the discos.”
”Oh.” And there you have it.
The jungle has taken over, you see. What right, indeed, do we have to expect working traffic lights at critical traffic intersections when people want to go to discotheques at night?
When there is no further rule of law, in the accepted, biblical, colonial sense, why should we still expect the former things to function as they functioned before? Who are we to question Uncle Bob’s infinite wisdom in allowing the whole thing to simply degenerate into its own chaos, chaos that makes more sense, in the African sense, than all this Europeanised nonsense that we don’t seem to be able to eject out of our heads?
The idea that there are still discos in Harare, and that there are still people who are able to get to them, hardly comes into the equation.
In the scheme of things, nothing is working, but everything still works. You have to try and see things from the other guy’s perspective. What looks like total collapse in Western eyes might be an extraordinary renaissance from the other point of view.
Or at least I hope that is how our president is seeing it. Bite the bullet. Press the flesh. You just never know.